I regularly decide that I am happy being retired and no longer having to deal with idiots in educational settings. And when I say idiots, I do not mean students or teachers. I mean those people who declare complex issues simple dichotomies, or who self-annoint as "experts" or who insist on one over-simplified size fits all. This week's vortex is "trans".
The cause for my thinking about this at all is because of "the algorithm". For reasons unbeknownst to humankind, Youtube decided to recommend to me videos by three different people labeled as "intersex". One caught my attention because the speaker was saying why she has no problem with the word hermaphrodite although essentially everyone else does, and I have a soft spot for discussions of language change, language choice and language death.
Oh, and apparently intersex is not "trans". The former refers to being born this way, the latter refers to changes but I can already see some difficulties with that distinction.
However, what I found relevant to this discussion is that one of the speakers looked 100% female with womanly curves, bikini shots, mannerisms, hair etc etc. Yet, she is biologically male. Apparently when we are developing, we start off as female and then hormones kick in causing shape-shifting to male. In her case, the hormone was insufficient so while she is male genetically, she is female in terms of appearance.
One of the others was mixed so XXY (perhaps it was XYY). In any case, when she was first hatched the doctors noticed that she was "ambiguous" and counseled her parents towards certain surgical choices. Years later, through genetic testing, she discovered that her masculine characteristics were because she was in fact male, despite her parents' surgery election and their having raised her with and to do girlish things. She also decided that she is not gay but heterosexual, although looking like a woman.
Notwithstanding medical and human evidence (apparently the incidence of intersex is the same as that of red-hair), we still have the idiots I mentioned above insisting that there are only two genders, and that anyone who demurs in this declaration or who wishes to suggest there are shades of gray, are problematic and/or to be vilified and/or to be attacked and destroyed career-wise.
This places schools in an at-best difficult position. Some students believe they are born in the wrong body. although reportedly some of these do in fact change their minds later, while others literally are.
What is a school to do? I don't know the answer, but I do know that yet again, a complex issue is not akin to to looking at a quarter. Can I ask again that politicians and newsreaders stop looking at "both sides" of an issue?
While the community as a whole should have input into "What is education?" and "What are schools for?", some views and those espousing them have no place. Reductio ad absurdam is one of them.
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